Book covers are crucial for readers to decide whether they are interested in a book or not. Although authors are the brand behind their books, unfortunately, covers do not always fit the brand, because, in traditional publishing, writers often do not have a say in book cover design. I would love to see more authors and translators involved in the cover design process – and not just in self-publishing

Some writers hate their book covers

Imagine you are over the moon, because you wrote a book, landed a deal with a publisher and cannot wait to hold a copy in your hands, but when you do, your jaw drops…

Several years ago, I attended a book reading with an author who spent a long time telling us how much she hated her book cover that she was forced to put up with. This could have been avoided if the publisher had involved her in the design process.

In this case, it was the all-dominant colour that the writer resented the most.

Authors can dislike their covers for various reasons, and here is another example: author Maureen Johnson said in a Guardian article how her covers implied she was a romance writer and because of that, a lot of men told her they didn’t want to read her books, which were intended for young adults and“no romance at all.”

Maureen tweeted:

I do wish I had a dime for every email I get that says: ‘Please put a non-girly cover on your book, so I can read it’ … signed – A Guy.

I translated a novel whose cover did not look like the book I had worked on

When I received my translator’s book copies from a publisher, I thought there had to be a mistake.

The book was set in Australia and as Australia has a large countryside, maybe the old, shabby shed on the cover was meant to symbolize this?

But the book was not about rural life and why was the shed so shabby? Perhaps the shabbiness was supposed to represent the events that led to the suicide in this novel – although the overall atmosphere was actually not as bleak as the cover suggested.

Translators are arguably the ones who, (apart from the author, of course) work so thoroughly on a book that we are more likely than most to get a deep understanding, yet I have never come across any traditional publisher who wanted to hear my opinion.

It can make financial sense for publishers to involve authors and translators

Professional in-house editorial, sales and marketing teams are usually the ones that know best what will or won’t sell and decide on the book cover.

As you can see in the example above about men who resented certain covers, however, this can obviously mean losing out on potential sales, if the author doesn’t have any say in the design process.

In addition, as the majority of authors are expected to do most of their marketing themselves, I cannot imagine any writer being motivated to promote a book if they resent its visual appearance. Again, this means publishing houses could probably make more sales if the writer loves the look of the product.

And whenever I have been mislead by a book cover, I will probably not buy another book by the same author again.As publishing houses tend to sign on authors for more than just one book, they can also lose out, when a cover has attracted the wrong audience.

Self-publishers have the freedom to participate in book cover design as much or as little as they like

I am currently experimenting with the cover designs of several books and I am loving it, although some people might say I should stay away from it and let trained professionals do the job.

To this, I answer I am a professionally trained translator, but will always say people who want to try their hands at literary translation without professional training should go for it if they have certain skills, are passionate about it and willing to learn.

Finding designers who have created book covers in the past that we liked and briefing them as well as possible is one way of dealing with cover design as a self-publisher.

A major reason for DIY cover designs is, of course, a lack of money, but this is not my only reason, because I want to learn and experiment and make book covers look exactly the way I want them to look.

I am the translator and not the author of one of the books I am working on and cannot ask the author’s opinion anymore, because she died, so it is an interesting additional challenge.

I know what kind of emotional reaction the book evoked in me, I would like to evoke a similar response in other people and want the cover to reflect just that.

Everything I do as a self-publisher, is a work in progress, I make mistakes along the way, tweak the results and move on. Freedom is important to me.

I strongly believe, if we do not allow ourselves to make mistakes, we cannot come up with truly new and worthwhile solutions in any area of life, including self-publishing.

The following quote by Mahatma Gandhi is one of my favourites:

Freedom is not worth having, if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.

I have only recently discovered Google’s speech to text solution and although I can type fast, this is even faster, and there are a number of other advantages

Choose the most suitable language — it is important

First, you need a Chrome browser and a Google or YouTube account (these two are nowadays the same). After logging in, click on Google docs, then on “Tools” and on “Voice Typing”.

Now you have a little box on your left with a grey microphone inside and at the top, you can change the language.

Make sure you choose the right option, otherwise you will not get good results.

English is not my first language and I have a foreign accent, but I have lived in the UK for a long time and UK English works fine for me, whereas US English does not. Whenever I am not writing in English, however, I need to switch to German or it won’t work at all.

After you have chosen the right language, click on the grey mike. It will turn red and you are ready to go. Any texts that you create now, will be saved in the “Google Drive” cloud.

By the way: my laptop’s built-in microphone works fine and there is no need to buy expensive gadgets.

Another tip: punctuation marks work best if you say them quickly after the last word, otherwise they might be turned into text.

I guess speech recognition will work better for some accents then for others and if your experience is different from mine, I would love to hear about it.

You could avoid writer’s block by speaking instead of typing

“Writer’s block” is an issue for many, but I have never heard of “speaker’s block” – and speaking is what you are actually doing here.

Speech recognition can be helpful for anyone, who like me tends to over- analyze, which sometimes made it difficult for me to finish anything in the past.

You can still go back and edit after having created text via speech recognition, but I have noticed I am not double-checking as much as I used to and I get a lot more writing done like this.

It is also often said it is best to “write as you speak” and what better way could there be to do just that and speak?

Preventing monotony and repetitive strain injury

Another thing I like about speech recognition is that it gives me more variety.

I have found that it inspires my creativity andprevents boredom.

In addition, too much typing can lead to wrist problems, eye strain, back and neck pain and other physical problems.

Speech to text even allows me to occasionally close my eyes while I’m talking whenever I feel like it.

You will get correct spelling straight away, at least as far as Google’s dictionary permits and so far, I have not found any problems with this.

There will, of course, be natural limits, for example with proper names and unusual words. A few errors will always occur, but I never worry about them and simply correct everything manually as I go.

One of the biggest benefits is the simplicity.

I guess there is more sophisticated software out there, but I am neither up for a steep learning curve nor can I afford to spend a lot of money for something that might not even work better than this.

Speech recognition can also help people with certain disabilities, who would otherwise not be able to type texts on their own.

Last but not least, I have my own, special reason for using the speech to text option: when I was younger, I sometimes worked as a typist, because I thought it might allow me to develop skills that would come in handy later —fast touch-typing is indeed helpful for translators as well as writers.

During my work as a typist, however, I noticed that only seemingly “really important” people were allowed to have their texts typed by somebody else and when I started writing myself, I had this vague feeling I wasn’t important and good enough to write.

Having my texts typed for me has done wonders for my self-esteem and it has brought my writing to the next level — especially because my typist is not a human being, but a machine.

In my opinion, we should all get rid of menial, repetitive tasks as much as we want and need so that we can focus more on our creativity.

Coming up with more creative solutions will become even more important in future. Just think of all the jobs that are being made redundant — not just those of typists — and there will definitely be more, especially the unskilled ones that require us to follow someone else’s orders.

We need more new, creative solutions in various areas of life, not just to developmore meaningful jobs, but also to deal with the many challenges we are facing in the world.

Unfortunately, most people fear nothing more than change. So why not start by changing something rather simple like speech to text?

I am enjoying it a lot, and this doesn’t mean I am using it all the time. Instead, I prefer a mixture of dictating, my own touch-typing and sometimes handwritten corrections on a printout.

My motivation was to self-publish an out-out-of print book in translation, but you may like to convert a print-only book into a digital copy for another reason when there is no digital copy available

The scanning process and how I dealt with yellowish book paper

Lost in translation on a floppy disk

The original translation had been on a floppy disk, but as this is an outdated medium, I had thrown it away at some point and did not save the content anywhere else, because I never expected I might want to use it one day.

I do own a print copy of the book, and I thought it would be easy to scan since I am using the latest Microsoft Office version that allows you to convert scanned PDFs into word files. Unfortunately, the not so white paper made the process more labour-intensive.

I ended up scanning the book with my multifunction printer, copying and pasting the text into a word file. Many mistakes occurred during this process, and another thorough proofreading process was necessary, although it has to be said that you will always find at least some errors in scanned texts.

Why I edited the translation again

I didn’t mind the additional thorough proofreading process too much because I was planning to revise the translation anyway. First of all, I did this because my translation skills had improved over the years and I knew I could make it better.

The second reason for the revision was the fact that the original editor had changed part of my translation to a rather formal language, which I found inappropriate for this novel. Back then, I couldn’t do anything about it, but as I am now holding the translation copyright, I was able to make changes.

This shows you that it is not just the translator who can create a different style than that of the original but an editor can sometimes contribute to this issue as well if he or she has the authority and wish to make major stylistic changes. This can sometimes drastically change the way how a book is perceived by readers in the other language.

A surprising discovery regarding German book formatting

Then I discovered something else only because I had to scan the book: I noticed inverted commas had been formatted «like this» in the German traditionally published version.

When I double-checked with other German self-published books, in almost all of them, inverted commas were formatted„this way‟ which is the usual formatting in most German documents, but not in traditional publishing, and I was surprised to notice that most self-publishers, including myself, never seemed to notice.

Doing it „like this‟ is not wrong and some people might even prefer it, but I think «this other version» looks better and more professional in books and I will definitely do it this way again, whenever I self-publish another book in German.

The most challenging part of my project turned out to be copyrights and although not the sexiest topic, it is very important.

If you ask yourself why you should even bother about self-publishing an out-of-print book in translation, maybe because you do not (yet?) have a book with a publishing house, let alone in translation, there are various reasons for this and I am writing about them in part 1 of this article.

Know your rights

If a book is out of print and the publishing house ist not going to publish it again, you have the right to get you copyright back – don’t think publishers are doing you a special favour.

When the German publishing house returned my translation copyright to me, they were then saying I HAD to get in touch with the original Australian publisher to sort out the original rights and my biggest mistake was to do just that.

My attempts to get information from the publisher in question and the original literary agency were mostly ignored – they were obviously not prepared to tell me who the original copyright holder was. Eventually they said they were not in touch with the right holder, although the book was still available as an ebook on at least one platform and I found this hard to believe. I am sure they saw me as a pain in the neck, as I tried to approach them various times in various ways.

To cut a long story short: in the end I got hold of the author’s son myself who is in charge of the literary estate and he retrieved the original rights to self-publish the book from the relevant publisher and was willing to cooperate with me directly. We now have a contract with each other to share any royalties.

I would strongly advise translators and authors to contact each other first and retrieve their rights separately.

I assume it might still be easier for authors or someone else who is entitled to the original rights to receive information regarding the translator than for the translator regarding the author.

If the translator is the most pro-active part in the game, I would recommend to put all your energy into contacting the author/the other party. Don’t waste your time approaching a publishing house or literary agent, if they are not legally obliged to give you information.

Message from Amazon: “We do not let translators self-publish their translated books”

It did not stop with the above mentioned issue, however. When I tried and publish the book on Amazon, the e-mail I got back from them was saying they wouldn’t let me deal with this myself, it should be the author. The author is dead, however, and it would not have made much sense to ask the original rights holder to deal with it, because I was the one who wanted to go ahead with this project in the first place and I know from another experience that publishing platforms are sometimes sending information in German if you have uploaded a book in German and it would have complicated matters enourmously if we had accepted this option. In Germany, Amazon is not as dominant for self-publishers as in the English-speaking world, by the way.

The most important reason why Amazon is so successful seems to be the fact that they have streamlined their processes and they are sending you automated answers, which wasn’t helpful in my case and I had to wait until I could talk to a senior Amazon representative at the London Book Fair, who advised me to open a separate account on Amazon, not under my own name as a translator, but create a new name and act as if you were setting up your own publishing house and this is what I did in the end.

My other platform of choice was Tolino Media, a successful German platform for self-publishers. They are providing a phone number and it was great to talk to someone in person from the start, especially about my (so far?) rather unusual project. They allowed me to open an account in the author’s name, because she is dead and I had sorted out the rights. The Tolino Media website is in German, but if you don’t speak the language and would like to include their platform, you can do so via Draft2Digital.

Conclusion

The whole area of self-published translations is still rather new and I believe there is often some confusion about rights and maybe my problems with the original publishers resulted partly from this confusion. In addition, I can imagine they do not not want to encourage translators to go the self-publishing route. There are many authors who are doing this already, but so far, book translations are still almost exclusively in the hand of traditional publishers.

I believe publishers need not worry, as it is not just about retrieving rights after all. There is also marketing involved and this seems to be more difficult for translators than for authors. In self-publishing, the special author-audience relationship can be a distinct advantage which readers love, but this does not necessarily help translators who are trying to promote book translations, because we cannot answer personal questions regarding writing the book, any background information etc directly in the same way authors can.

Therefore I believe the route I am writing about here is mainly for translators who are also promoting something else that fits, like similar books or services, but if they do, I see no reason why they shouldn’t do it, and in my opinion it would even make more sense if translators approach authors than authors approaching translators – not just when it comes to retrieving rights but translating books in the first place, because they know best what kind of books they think they can successfully promote themselves.

If you have any more questions regarding copyrights that I have not yet answered here then please don’t hesitate and ask me.

First of all: I am still here, I haven’t given up blogging although it’s been a while since I last posted on this blog, but life got in the way and I am not even apologizing for it 🙂

A lot happened in 2016, e.g. the Brexit referendum which effects me as an EU citizen in the UK directly and nobody knows what the situation will be like for someone like me once the country has actually left the EU. I am glad that unlike refugees, I could not just move to my home country but to other EU countries as well. In the end I might even decide myself I would be better off elsewhere – who knows? The referendum taught me a valuable lesson: never to take anything for granted and to embrace flexibility as the new safety. Sometimes a shake-up can even be beneficial and push you to make some overdue changes.

Having said that, I came to the conclusion that London is currently still my favourite place in the world. I am grateful because I have had the opportunity to meet interesting people here from the UK and almost every corner of the world with all kinds of different backgrounds, which has been very inspiring.

In 2016, a large part of my income sources came still from freelance translation work, but for me like for many other colleagues, the situation went from bad to worse. In the end I had extremely tight deadlines and working nights and weekends was no longer an exception but almost industry standard, which affected my life and health in a negative way.

I read A LOT in 2016 and the rise of populists and fake news was obvious. In addition, traditional media mainly focused on bad news, as usual, because this attracts mainstream readers and advertising. Last year you could get the impression there was hardly anything positive happening in the world. I was glad I found inspiring independent media, too, to put things into perspective – including blogs.

My resolutions for 2017

I enjoy blogging myself, and doing it regularly is one of my goals in 2017. I intend to publish an article every week on each of my blogs.

Another goal is to write a little bit every day and I am happy to say I am already doing it.

I intend to finish self-publishing an out-of print novel that was translated by me in the past and I am on the case.

In addition, I am planning to write at least one short self-published book both in English and German at the same time.

Writing away from my home desk is good for me and I want to do this more often in 2017. Therefore I am now not just writing in cafes and pubs on a regulary basis but have joined the great Blog Club of London Bloggers Meetup, a get-together with other bloggers to write, share information and encourage each other. We meet at the premises of @WorkHubs, a coworking space in London very close to Euston tube and rail station and within walking distance of the Eurostar terminal at St. Pancras. @WorkHubs are offering various different options and you can even use their desks on a daily basis and they also seem to be a good option for people who are visiting London only temporarily.

I wish you good luck with everything that is on your own agenda in 2017!